Sheltered Disclosures

One Sentence Description:
Desperate for a job, an unemployed woman’s shelter advocate agrees to council an abused woman despite hairy complications and disclosures.

Two Sentence Description:
A broke, laid-off women’s shelter advocate takes a temp job to privately counsel a viciously abused young woman. The employer’s a werewolf and the client might sprout fur, but the victim needs her and this unnerving disclosure might lead to her niche in life—if she can assimilate a new reality.

As wordy as I am, it’s extremely difficult to compress into one sentence a story that previously took me at least fifteen minutes to describe. But it’s needed for publishing so I did it and

There it is—exposed to public eyes.

If you’ve read my Works in Progress (WIP) page you know how reluctant I’ve been to share details of my writing. I’m not sure what my issue is. Maybe it’s fear of being laughed at or that someone will bring me to earth and tell me you can’t become an author—that’s for other people. After all, my Mom does snicker every time I mention my writing. Or, maybe I’m afraid a real author or an editor will see it and drop the sorry but you have no talent bomb.

Don’t know the answer but I’m sticking my neck out and I will hit the PUBLISH button now…or maybe next week…

I’m Not Reading: I’m Writing 🙂

I’ve been re-infected with my writing bug
I’m excited! I started a new Novel for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) Novemeber
But instead of NaNoWriMo’s Novemeber 50K word novelette and quantity vs quality challenge,

I set personal goals for this month:

Research, develop characters, world-build and organized this information in a Scrivener file—writing software I’ll be learning as well. (Scrivener is offering a free trial for the month and 1 week.)

Create a detailed outline of the story and major plot lines.

Write. (I might refine this goal later.)

Maintain this blog with 3 feature blogs a week.

November is Half Over. I’m proud to report that I’ve completed most of this challenge and then some.

First Goal: 90% accomplished. I’m using (but not yet mastered) Scrivener. I’ve done all the front end research. I have dozens of pages of notes about my characters, plot lines, and world building. Much of this information is downloaded into Scrivener. (Some will never need to be there.) In addition, since I’m very visual so I searched Google images and found images of people that have the look and feel of all my main characters and pasted them into each character page on Scrivener. I’ve started a song list I’ll use for mood setting and inspiration of events and characters.

Second Goal:Done I’ve created an outline of all the major plots and events. I’ve structured and plotted the story structure with the seven key points of each of my three main plotlines and integrated them into the main storyline.

Third Goal:Ongoing – Doing Great Was not quantified but I’m farther that I thought I would be at the halfway point. I’m writing. I have over 5K words in my first draft on Scrivener and the pages are well written. This word count does not include the Scrivener and Microsoft Word pages and the handwritten note books and loose pages of with rough or detailed scenes and related brainstorming that may or may not get integrated into the novel as the story develops.

Fourth Goal: Ongoing – Doing okay. I got engrossed and forgot last Wednesday’s post but got it published before 9am. I’ve created and scheduled this Wednesday’s and Saturday’s Post.

What are my Neighbors Reading?

I don’t know? Sorry I was so focused on the book I never asked.

Note: Honesty, the first few chapters of the novel is written much better than this post, and the pages are already edited better. I fixed some of the obvious mistakes in this post and added the forgotten What are you Reading Today artwork. Sorry, kind of dashed this off.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is an event as well as a fun, fast approach to novel writing.

The Challenge: Write a novel in 30 days.

Participants began writing yesterday, Tuesday, November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel by 11:59:59, November 30.
Readers, that’s about 1700 words a day, for 30 days. Outlines, research, and other and preparation can be done before Nov. but the actual writing of the actual novel must be started from scratch. Due to the limited writing time the object is quantity over quality or as the organization puts it, “Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft.”

History of NaNoWriMo:
The first NaNoWriMo happened in 1999, in the San Francisco Bay area with 21 participants. The 2nd year 140 writers participated. The 3rd year a web site was added and 5,000 joined the challenge. In 2010, the 12th year: 200,500 participated and 37,500 won—completed the challenge. 2,872,682,109 words were officially logged during the event.

Karen LeRosier’s Personal Challenge:

I’ve been whining that I can’t get myself motivated to write. I decided to use the NaNoWriMo challenge to motivate me. Since I value quality and quantity, and I’ll be taking a week off to prepare for and entertaining on Thanksgiving, I set my own personal goals. When I reach this goal Nov. 30, I won’t be an official winner but I can blow my own horn. I hope my readers will cheer me over the personal finish line I’ve created.

My Challenge:

Research, develop characters, world-build and organized this information in a Scrivener file—writing software I’ll be learning as well. (Scrivener is offering a free trial for the month and 1 week.)

Create a detailed outline of the story and major plot lines.

Write. (I might refine this goal later.)

Maintain this blog with 3 feature blogs a week.

The week before, I did some mental brainstorming in preparation. I have a rudimentary premise, story line, characters, and some world-building.*
I’ll keep you apprized of my progress and share information about my story as the weeks play out.

I’m pumped and excited!
Karen

*World-building is the process of constructing setting, an imaginary world for the book to take place in. In the case of Urban Fantasy, location and landscape is real (or realistic) but some fantastical element is added, usually supernatural races and/or magic. The world-building is more about creating supernatural races, their abilities and physiology, societal systems, language, and how this impacts humans and their world.